Cherry Potts, Writer

Category: Writing

  • Inspirations – claustrophobia in the closet

    To celebrate HM the Queen’s royal assent on Gay Marriage, some thoughts about what it used to be like when I was first coming out in 1982… when I wrote Trying to Tell You… A story about coming out,  not to straight colleagues or family, but to the only Visible Lesbian ( this is my…

  • Towersey countdown #SpreadtheWordThree

    So, here’s the plan: Myself and two other hand chosen operatives will infiltrate the festival that has been held in Towersey, a small Oxfordshire village for years and years, and turn what has until now been a folk music event into a celebration of the spoken word.  Watches have been synchronised, and train timetables perused. …

  • Inspirations – Marvell and computers

    The short story Mosaic of Air, (title story of my first collection and republished this coming September)  began life in a computer literacy class in the late 1980’s. I was bored, the class was going slowly, and I’d been given some BASIC code to play with.  I started to imagine what would happen if the…

  • .Cent Magazine

     .Cent Magazine  published my flash fiction, Is Nothing, in their Cornucopia edition under the Harvest theme. You have to sign up to read, but it doesn’t commit you to anything. Lovely illustration too. This story came from running an exercise with a group at Swindon  Festival of Literature in 2012 –  in silence, just writing…

  • Keats Festival 2013 opens

    Today is the first full day of the Keats Festival, which is held at Keats House, Keats Grove, Hampstead. I spent yesterday evening at the launch event, listening to the poetry of Jay Bernard (Demon’s in Hell go on strike, in the most visceral meaty bit of poetry I’ve heard in a long time, very…

  • Old notebooks

    On the shelf above my desk, and in the bottom left-hand drawer are old notebooks, some have a few pages left to use, others are full: with the detritus of writing.  Several friends and I have this ongoing thing of buying each other notebooks – writers can never have too many notebooks, although I do…

  • Playing at Spring

    We know it isn’t really spring, right? A day lent, as A.’s Ma would have said; but it is doing a fair impression: washing drying on the line, bees in the Pulmonaria, first lunch in the garden (in jumper, but still!), but we are promised the bitter east wind back again, and rain too, so…

  • Writing from a Lesbian Perspective

    Its LGBT History Month. Whether you know this may depend on whether you or any of your friends is Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual or Transgender. It certainly doesn’t get the kind of coverage Black History month gets. With my Arachne Press hat on, I’m doing a reading tonight at Ealing and on Monday at Deptford, with…

  • getting a cover for a book

    This is a strange way of going about things, but I’ve just chosen a cover for a book that I haven’t finished writing yet. We’ve been running a competition over at Arachne Press for the covers of the next two books, and I got down to three gorgeous, wonderful designs for the reprint of Mosaic…

  • The Singing Season

    Not that the singing season ever went away, it’s a bit like football, the break gets shorter all the time; but we didn’t do Sing for Water this year because of A’s broken leg, so larynx and lungs feeling a bit under used. So the good news is that Raise the Roof is back next…